Kira (Kira Greene)

So a lot of the time what's happening there is our attention is constantly being interrupted.

by, you know, constant notifications, something buzzes.

And those things really do kind of capture our attention.

And that's, again, a kind of evolved mechanism that we have this attentional capture.

But there isn't really any evidence that that's actually affecting the function of our memory.

What it can do, of course, is because, say, something like working memory is essentially really a process of attention, okay?

So in order to engage in working memory, so let's say I give you a list of words to remember and then I ask you to repeat them back to me, okay?

And that's a very conscious process.

It requires a lot of attention to engage in that.

If you get distracted, that information is gone.

OK, so during that kind of short term period, if your attention is distracted, then you're not encoding that information.

OK, it's not that it's been encoded and then it's been wiped out of your brain.

It's that you didn't encode it properly in the first place.

And that, in fact, a lot of the time when people talk about various failures of their memory, even in kind of things like, say, eyewitness memory, actually a lot of the time it's not a failure of memory at all.

It's that their attention was distracted, so they didn't encode the event.

They were looking at their phones, so they didn't see the crime happening across the street.

So I don't think it's the case that that technology is kind of hacking our brains or changing anything, but it is a case that it can sort of steal our attention away from where we want to be.

So I think those are two different things.

Technology does play a role in what we choose to remember, but I don't think it affects how we remember.

So the fundamental mechanism of memory is the same and has always been the same.